


Picnic at Asgard

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 05:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is dying, and so he goes to see the woman who died for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picnic at Asgard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [honeynoir](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=honeynoir).



He hesitates, for a moment, before opening one of the doors of his TARDIS and peeking out into an elegant office. She’s already standing.

“Doctor,” River Song greets, pleasantly, “and the pretty boy body! It must be my lucky day.” She leans across her desk with that salacious smirk she does so well... and he wonders, in another universe, does Rose look at the half-him that way?

“Doctor?” she asks, her smile wilting a little as worry creeps into her voice. “Is everything alright?”

He can feel the heat rising off his skin, the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the edge of dizziness come to take it all away. No, he’s not alright, but he smiles anyway.

“I thought we might go for a bit of an adventure, see a planet or two, have a picnic in the fields of Asgard... what do you say, River Song?”

She looks at him with that sad, serious expression she wears so well... and then she smiles, kind and warm.

“How ever did you guess that I love a picnic?” she asks, lightly. “I’ll just grab my coat, shall I? In case we overshoot and arrive after the sun’s burned out and it’s all turned to ice.”

“We will not--” he barks, and for a moment he forgets the nausea and the shakes. Her smile turns sly.

“I’m sure you’ll manage just fine, sweetie. But let me grab my coat.” She makes her way to the door of her office with quick, light steps and pulls her coat off a hook. She’s surprisingly fit outside an astronaut suit; her hair springs around her face and her suit is, well, _well-tailored._

He manages not to overshoot, and they step out into a field of golden flowers.

“Oh,” she breathes out next to him, her eyes wide with the wonder of such beauty. “Have you been, before?” she asks in a whisper.

After a moment, he nods. “Brought Sarah Jane here once, for the flowers.”

River can also gush: “Oh! She’d just have loved these, tell me she did, I’m sure of it!”

“Do you know everything about me?” he asks, instead of answering.

“What did you bring to eat? We can hardly have a picnic without food.” Apparently, River can play this game as well as he can. This time, he chooses to answer.

“There’s a shop that sells ready-made picnic baskets just behind us.”

River grins and him and dashes off. She picks the basket and pays for it before he has a chance to catch her up, and twenty minutes has them sitting amongst the flowers, munching on an embarrassingly aphrodisiac meal.

“Do you know everything about me, River Song?” he asks, as she seals very lovely lips around a truffle and bites down.

“No,” she answers, without a smirk, once she has swallowed her food. “You know as well as I that no one will ever truly know you. Why do you ask?” She tilts her head as if his answer is the most interesting thing in the world.

“I’m dying,” he says, instead of or perhaps as an answer. She lifts an eyebrow.

“Too much radiation. This body is dying. I have two, maybe three hours left.”

“But you’ll regenerate?” she asks, perhaps a tad too sharply. He glares at her.

“Why should I?”

So, naturally, she slaps him. For a moment, he is too flabbergasted to react, and she steals that moment to speak.

“Don’t be such a child. There’s always something to live for, you know that better than most. Didn’t she teach you _anything?”_

“Didn’t who teach me?” he snarls back.

“Rose,” she replies, so matter of fact that he loses words completely. “I know what you were like after the Time War, sweetie, I’ve gone back and seen it for myself. I know what you were and I’ve seen what she helped you become. If there was any one thing you should have learned from that girl, my love, it was that there is, surprisingly, _always_ hope. I won’t have you soiling her memory so that you can _angst_ like a teenage schoolboy.”

He realizes, after a moment of silence, that he is merely opening and shutting his mouth. Her eyes soften, and she leans across the picnic blanket to cup his chin in her delicate hand.

“Doctor, I know you don’t know me yet, but I know you. You’re mad and brilliant and I know you’re afraid to die. I know, I swear to you that I know what it is like to give up everything you are and become another person entirely. And I know that it’s been so long and you’ve lived and seen and loved so much this time around that you can’t bear to leave it all behind. It is a sort of death, my love--but if you’ll only _remember,_ it is also a sort of life.”

He pulls away from her... but he nods.

She resumes eating, more slowly this time, as if something is weighing on her. Eventually, he asks, “How do you... did _I_ tell you about Rose?”

“Not... not exactly. But I’ve seen her singing in your mind and I know what she was and is and will be to you. She was very beautiful.”

“Is,” he whispers, and she sighs.

“Will you tell me about her? And the others, Rose and Donna and Liz and Zoe, and the others I will never meet.”

“You’ve met Sarah Jane?” he asks, harking back to their earliest conversation.

“And the Brigadier,” she confirms. “But only because I sought them out. We both know that you never go back, not if you can help it.”

“I do not--”

She lays a firm hand on his arm, and glares very slightly. “You do, and you know it, and you are right to leave them when you do.”

For a moment, his eyes lose focus as he remembers. And slowly, so slowly, he begins:

“She... she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on, my TARDIS. She was already a museum piece, about to be recycled, and... I stole her and ran away, and when I got lonely I came back and took my granddaughter away to travel with me. Her name was Susan and she was... she was so, so brilliant. Locked away now, with the rest of them. And her teachers, Ian and Barbara--oh, I thought so _little_ of humans when I met them. Just another little species, to be recorded in our paperwork and filed away and occasionally manipulated if necessary. I didn’t... they didn’t teach us to _think_ on Gallifrey...”

And he tells her the story of every companion, how he found them, how they changed and changed him, how he lost them. Polly, Adric, Jo, and Romana. And if her face flares up with jealousy every now and again from the tender way he spoke of his companions, the love he had had for them once, she is quick to cover it with an understanding smile.

“And then there’s you,” he says, after he quietly explains what he had given so that Wilf might live. “I don’t know a thing about you, River.”

She looks down and carefully straightens the corner of the picnic blanket.

“You know that I will always be there for you,” she finally offers. “I will do whatever it is that you need me to do. Even if... even if it means crossing time streams and breaking my past with you, if you need it, I will do it.”

Slowly, he responds. “The first time I met you, River... you told me that I must never rewrite our time, not one line of it.”

She looks up at him now, and he is startled to realize that there are tears in her eyes. “You’re happy, in the future, I promise. But I swear, I would break all of time just to make you happy now. I can’t bear it.”

“River, who are you?”

He prepares himself for that word, that irritating awful _annoying_ word. He prepares to be enraged, to storm off and leave her stranded and wallow in vindictive anger, and then she answers.

“One day you’ll pause for a moment, and you’ll realize that you are really, truly happy. And it will be because you find out, finally, who I am. Can you trust me just enough to promise that you will wait for that day?”

He can’t answer that, and she seems to understand.

“I think you’ve rather spoiled my appetite,” she says, sitting up straight and brushing off her hands. Her sing-song, teasing tone and matching smile almost manages to mask a quiet sort of sorrow that seems to have settled over her. “Shall we go? You have a victory tour to finish.”

“Victory tour?” he asks, his eyebrows drawing in. The heat and the nausea are rising again, no longer forgotten amidst memories of the past.

“Oh dear, hadn’t you started that yet? Well, you will. A grand farewell, a visit to everyone you love to say goodbye to a life well-lived. And I promise you; the next will be just as grand.”

He closes his eyes for a brief moment, and almost before he knows it she is helping him to his feet and guiding him back to the TARDIS. He drops her back at her office and she blows him a kiss as she leaves, and then he sets the coordinates to visit Martha. Good old Martha, who saved the world. Maybe he did right by her in the end, after all.

He whistles an almost cheery note as the TARDIS begins to hum.


End file.
